


I Love the Riddles That You Speak

by Linsky



Series: Wolfverse [6]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Angst, Cuddles, First Time, Growing Up, Homophobia, M/M, Pining, Prejudice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-15 01:27:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11795568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linsky/pseuds/Linsky
Summary: Taylor has always known better than to tell his teammates he’s gay.(Can be read as a stand-alone)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the beginning of this almost two years ago, when I was tying myself in knots trying to make one of my 1988 sagas work for anyone except 1988 (spoiler: it didn’t), and I needed a distraction. I wrote most of the rest of it while I was, no joke, concussed from hitting my head on the ice this winter (I DON’T EVEN PLAY HOCKEY. What is my life.) And then it took me six months after that to get around to finishing it for real. The story that keeps on storying!
> 
> This one explores some of the corners of the wolfverse that didn’t get much attention amid all of Patrick and Jonny’s and Tyler and Jamie’s alpha/omega pining. You don’t need to read any of that to read this, but this does contain spoilers, particularly for Tame the Roads, and I do think this will make more sense if you’ve read at least some of the rest of the ’verse. If you don't want to, though, feel free to read this on its own! :D
> 
> Thanks to aohatsu for enthusiastic audiencing!!
> 
> (Sorry about the title. I could NOT resist.)
> 
>  [Tumblrrrr](https://linskywords.tumblr.com/)

Taylor has always known better than to tell his teammates he’s gay.

He hesitates about it a little when Ebs texts him about living together on the day of the draft. He doesn’t hesitate about the yes—sends that text embarrassingly fast—but later that night, after all the parents and grandparents and other assorted relatives are done taking him to dinner and he’s alone in his hotel room, he wonders if maybe there’s another text he should send.

It’s not like he’s being dishonest by not sending it, though. He and Ebs have never actually talked about liking girls, so he’s never lied about it. And—Ebs might look at him differently, if he knew. He might not let Taylor flop down next to him on the couch like Taylor is already picturing doing, in an apartment where both of them live. Which would be stupid, because it’s not like Taylor’s into Ebs. So it shouldn’t matter.

He puts his phone back on the night table and turns off the light. He’ll just keep it from being a problem, and then Ebs won’t need to know.

***

Having his own apartment is awesome. Not that he and Ebs are very good at the whole adult thing yet, but they know how to cook KD and Ebs can even do laundry and they’re _playing in the NHL._ If that’s not an adult thing, Taylor doesn’t know what is.

It’s still kind of weird being on his own sometimes, though. That’s when it’s good to have Ebs there.

They go shopping for a couch together. Other stuff can wait, but they both agree that a couch is essential. “Where else will we sit to play video games?” Ebs asks, and Taylor knew there was a reason they were friends.

“We should maybe get this one,” he says, looking at a big black one shaped like an L. “It looks kind of—grown-up, you know?”

“Plus, dude.” Ebs’ eyes go wide as he pushes back on one of the recliners at the end. “Look what it can do!”

Taylor giggles. Yeah, this is the couch.

He hands over his credit card for it. He still hasn’t gotten over that: they have money now, and they can just buy things and put them on their cards. Not too much stuff—his mom gave him that lecture, and how much does he really need, anyway?—but he can see this kickass couch and then _buy_ it.

“Hang on, how come you’re buying it?” Ebs asks.

“Too slow,” Taylor says as the girl runs his credit card. Then Ebs looks bummed out, so Taylor says, “You’ll just have to buy me a bunch of dinners or something,” and Ebs brightens up, and then Taylor feels awesome because it’s like he’s treating someone. To a _couch._

It feels even better when they have the couch at home and the two of them kick back in the recliners and start an epic NHL 11 battle. Taylor, like, dominates, except then Ebs is a dirty cheater, and they end up wrestling for the controllers. On the couch, which is insanely comfortable, so, win.

The wrestling loses steam after a while and they end up just sort of lying on top of each other. It’s lazy and a little bit sweaty and awesome. It’s the kind of thing Taylor pictured when he imagined being in an apartment with just Ebs: the two of them bumming around with no sense of personal boundaries. He’s really glad Ebs doesn’t seem weird about it or anything.

Ebs butts Taylor in the arm with his scratchy chin. Taylor grins and shoves Ebs’ face into the cushions.

***

Taylor’s a grownup now and everything, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to object when his mom wants to come up for the weekend before training camp. His mom is awesome. And it turns out he and Ebs only have three forks and one broken spoon between them, so.

His mom drags them to Home Goods and makes them buy all sorts of shit, and then she won’t let them go sit on the couch until they put it all away in the kitchen and the hall closet. Taylor thinks it would have been fine if it had stayed in bags for a couple of weeks, but whatever, the kitchen does look better now.

“Dude, your mom is awesome,” Ebs says when she’s out of the room.

Taylor grins. His mom has always been awesome. “Better than yours,” he says, and Ebs shoves him and they go back and forth a bit, until Taylor’s foot slips on a shopping bag and he almost falls over and his mom comes back into the room to give him a look.

She hugs him for a really long time before she leaves the next day. “I can’t believe you’re going to be living here on your own,” she says.

Taylor shifts uncomfortably. He’s not, like, embarrassed by his mom or anything, but—Ebs is standing right there. And he’s a grownup now. “Not alone,” he mumbles.

“I know, I just wish I knew you’d be safe.” She pulls back and squeezes his arms.

She says this like every time he leaves. Taylor doesn’t get this about parents. Obviously he’s going to be safe. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

“Of course not, it’s just…” She frowns. “You know what they say about Edmonton.”

It takes him a minute to remember what they say about Edmonton. Then he laughs. “Mom. It’s not like I’m going to run into a wolf on the streets of the city. I think they, like, stay out in the wilderness and stuff.”

She looks unconvinced. “Just make sure you and Jordan stick together when you go out, okay?”

Taylor basically wants to die. He can see Ebs shifting his weight awkwardly out of the corner of his eye. “I promise,” Taylor mumbles, looking anywhere but at Ebs.

He braces himself for chirping after she leaves, but Ebs doesn’t say anything about it. He just, like, putters around the kitchen until Taylor has to throw a pillow at him from the couch. It’s their last day before training camp starts; they can’t waste it on _not_ playing video games. “Hey. Loser. Come over here and get your ass kicked.”

“With an offer like that.” Ebs elbows Taylor out of his seat—Ebs got to choose first, because he’s the oldest—and flops down next to him.

***

Taylor wakes up the next morning to drops of water hitting his face.

He’s totally confused for a moment—like, did he accidentally fall asleep outside?—before he opens his eyes and sees Ebs there, a cup of water in his hands and a huge grin on his face.

“You non,” Taylor says, lunging at him.

The water gets spilled all over the floor in the wrestling match that follows, and neither of them has time to shower before camp, but Taylor wins, so it’s worth it.

***

Part of being on an actual NHL team is hanging out in bars. Taylor’s been looking forward to this part. He drank plenty in juniors, but that was always, like, in someone’s basement, or at a party if someone’s billet parents let them host. Now they can actually buy alcohol in public, even Taylor.

“Fuck, we’re in an actual bar,” he says to Ebs one of the first nights they all go out, when he’s lost track of how many beers he’s had. “How awesome is this?”

Ebs nods solemnly. “I think I’m going to throw up,” he says.

Taylor ends up holding Ebs’ head while he throws up in the bathroom. Ebs doesn’t need someone to hold his hair back, not like Taylor’s cousin Lily did when they snuck those wine coolers last summer at the family reunion, but he’s kind of wobbling all over the place and Taylor doesn’t want him to, like, hit his head on the toilet and die. Plus, it always makes Taylor feel better if someone puts their hand on the back of his neck while he’s throwing up.

Taylor puts his hand on the back of Ebs’ neck, and it’s kind of sweaty and gross. He holds on anyway. He thinks about letting go when Ebs is done, but Ebs is still unsteady, so Taylor leaves his hand there. “Dude, you reek,” he tells Ebs.

“It’s even worse from over here,” Ebs says, and that seems fair. Ebs is a lot closer to himself, after all.

They try to drink less after that. It’s just good sense. They’re professional athletes, after all.

It’s still fun to be out with the guys, laughing at Khabi’s weird deadpan humor and letting everyone tease them for being the rookies. When Taylor scores his first NHL goal, Hemmy buys him shots of, like, some god-awful Czech whiskey, and the face Ebs makes when Taylor gets him to down one of the shots is almost as good as the goal.

Gags plops down across from him one night in early November, a week or so before Taylor’s birthday, when they’ve just lost to the Red Wings and everyone’s trying to drown their sorrows. “Okay, kid, time for the scoring talk.”

Taylor doesn’t need a scoring talk. He got a goal that night. The only goal of a 3-1 loss, but still.

Gags’ grin sharpens when he says that. “Exactly. So it’s a perfect night for it.”

Taylor doesn’t get what he’s talking about until Gags looks over his shoulder and wiggles his eyebrows. Taylor turns around to look—it’s just the bar, nothing special going on—and then he sees the pair of girls giggling and shooting glances their way. His cheeks get hot.

“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Gags says. “You can’t just blush and duck when a girl is looking at you. You have to seize the moment! Talk the talk!”

“They’re probably just fans,” Taylor mumbles.

“It’s Edmonton,” Gags says. “Everyone’s either a fan, or they hate us.” He pauses. “Or both. A surprising amount of the time it’s both.”

Fuck. Taylor’s been avoiding this so far. There were some girls in juniors—friends of friends he made out with at parties, just to make sure people saw him. He could maybe do that here. But no—this is the NHL. He’s probably supposed to take a girl home.

“Come on, I’m starting to be worried about your health,” Gags says, and Taylor forces a laugh and gets out of the booth and heads toward the bar.

He runs into Ebs before he gets there. Ebs is carrying a beer in each hand. “You want one?” Ebs says.

Taylor takes a beer, but he also blurts out, “Gags wants me to talk to those girls.”

Fuck, he probably sounds like a loser. But Ebs just says, “Which girls?”

Taylor gestures over Ebs’ shoulder. Ebs turns and looks at them, then back at Taylor. “So? Are you gonna do it?”

“I guess,” Taylor says, but he doesn’t move. It seems safer having Ebs’ body between himself and them.

Ebs watches him not move for a long minute, and then he says, “Okay, come on.”

It’s easier, walking over there with Ebs beside him. Taylor still isn’t sure what he’s going to do when he gets over there, but—

“Haaaaave you met Taylor?” Ebs says to one of the girls, and she giggles.

“What is this, _How I Met Your Mother_?”

“Yes,” Ebs says seriously. “Taylor is going to be the mother of your children.”

She giggles again and holds out her hand. Taylor shakes it and gives her the biggest smile he can manage.

Laura is a hockey fan, it turns out, and so is her friend. That makes it a lot easier, because Taylor can talk to them about hockey without having to think about how they’re girls. They watched the game tonight, so Taylor gets to feel cool about scoring a goal.

“Don’t get too excited, though, he probably won’t get any more of them,” Ebs says, and Taylor has to shove him away with a hand to the face.

“You’re cute,” Laura says to Taylor, when Ebs is talking to her friend.

Taylor’s stomach seizes up with something that’s not quite the same as excitement. He ducks his head and grins to hide it. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She swings her leg and brushes her foot against his calf. “You wanna dance?”

“Um.” No; except, yes, he does, right? “Sure.”

He feels so awkward going over to the dance floor with Laura’s hand in his. He feels like everyone’s gonna know—like someone’s going to stop him and be like, hang on, you’re not really attracted to her, go sit down. But no one can tell. No one knows. He’s fine.

Laura puts her hands on his arms, and he puts his hands on her hips, and—and they’re dancing.

It’s not awful. It’s fine. Taylor’s not, like, a bad dancer or anything. Probably. The only bad part is where he tries to figure out how close he’s supposed to get, and whether he’s supposed to touch her anywhere else, and that makes his heart beat too fast and his stomach squirm.

“Do you do this a lot?” she asks.

“Um, not really,” he says, and she smiles at him, so he guesses that’s okay.

She has dimples when she smiles. She’s kind of cute, Taylor guesses. Her boobs are, like, sort of visible over the top of her sparkly shirt. He tries to feel something, the way he used to try to feel something when the other guys would pass around magazines that were wrinkled on their favorite pages. But it never worked then, either.

The guys are probably watching. Gags definitely is, and maybe Ebs. He just needs to, like—he needs to do something.

He pulls Laura closer. He can feel her take a second to go with it, and then she relaxes into his touch a little and rubs against his thigh. And he closes his eyes and thinks: _A guy in my arms—a guy who wants me to touch him—_

He’s never actually felt that, but the thought of it sends a spark to his gut. His blood is coursing hot by the time he and Laura start kissing. Taylor keeps his eyes shut, and he can’t quite forget who he’s actually kissing, but he forgets enough that it’s startling when he pulls back and sees her eyeshadow and smeared lip gloss.

His stomach feels weird, looking at her like this and thinking that he was just kissing her. The kind of weird that makes him want to give some excuse and go back to his table. But she’s still pressed against him, and the guys are probably watching, and—and he doesn’t want to have to do this all over again, another night.

He leans in close to her ear. “Did you want to, um.”

There’s a pause before she answers, and he has a wild flare of hope that she’ll say no. But then she just says, “Yeah, you want to come to mine?”

His fingers are drumming against the side of his pants while they wait for a cab. Laura is next to him, dimples popping when he catches her eye, and he’s not sure how some people just…do this, all the time. His heart is racing so badly she can probably hear it, and he’s soaked through the armpits of his shirt.

“So, the Blackhawks next,” she says. “Taking on the reigning Cup champions, huh?”

“Yeah,” he says weakly, and he and Ebs spent a solid ten minutes tonight bad-mouthing the Blackhawks’ offense, but he can’t come up with a single thing to say.

It smells like cigarette smoke in the cab, like the driver smokes in there when there are no passengers. “It’s not very far,” Laura tells Taylor when she’s given the driver the address.

She’s sitting a really awkward distance away—like, close enough for him to be nervous that she might touch him, but not close enough that they’re just touching already and he doesn’t have to think about. “Do you think we could open a window or something?” Taylor asks.

They don’t say a lot on the ride, probably because Taylor can’t keep a conversation going. He knows it’s rude, but he’s too busy thinking through what comes next. They’ll get to her place, and then he’ll pay the cab driver, and they’ll go inside, and—and they’ll have sex. Will they have sex right away? Or will she expect him to, like, talk, or watch a movie or something first? He kind of hopes they go straight to the sex, because at this point he just wants to get it over with. Except what if he messes it up? He can probably get it up okay; he’s eighteen, and he has a lot of porn to draw on. But he doesn’t really know how the rest of it’s supposed to go, except, like, putting it inside of her. What if he’s supposed to touch her in other ways? What if there are ways he’s supposed to act that, like, show he’s into her, and he doesn’t do them, and she calls him on it, and—

“Hey, are you okay?” she asks.

Taylor’s breathing really hard, and his hands are jammed under his thighs because they won’t stop shaking. “I don’t think I can do this,” he says.

“Oh,” she says, surprised, and pulls her hand back from where it was reaching towards him.

It’s a relief when the cab finally drops her off.

“Where to?” the driver asks, a smirk in his voice, and Taylor feels his cheeks burn as he gives his address.

Except—he can’t go home, can he, because what if Ebs comes home? Ebs probably knows when Taylor left with Laura, and he definitely knows that this wasn’t long enough to have sex, and—fuck.

“Um,” Taylor says, voice cracking a little. “Could you actually drop me off at the store on the corner?”

The lady behind the counter looks up as Taylor slinks into the convenience store. He hunches his shoulders and reads stupid celebrity gossip in _People_ and pretends to be interested until enough time has gone by.

Ebs is home when he gets back. Taylor is so relieved to be—he doesn’t know: home, normal, with Ebs instead of girls who want him to fuck them—that he gives him a smile as soon as he comes in the door.

Ebs looks kind of tense, like maybe he’s thinking about the game tonight or something, but he looks up when Taylor comes in. His expression changes, goes all confused for a moment, and then: “You didn’t sleep with her.”

The smile falls off Taylor’s face. “What are you talking about? Of course I did.”

“No,” Ebs says. Now he’s kind of smiling a little. “You didn’t. You didn’t sleep with her.”

Taylor takes an automatic step back. His pulse is going rabbit-speed. Ebs knows; Ebs can see; Ebs can—except, no. Ebs can’t know. Taylor hasn’t done anything to give himself away.

“Dude,” he says, going for a laugh. “You are so crazy.”

Ebs’ face is lit up now, like he’s laughing at Taylor, and he’s coming towards him. “Oh my God. Did you just, like, leave her at her place without even going in?”

“Of course not.” Taylor backs up a step and hits the front door. “What the fuck are you even talking about?”

“You didn’t hook up with her,” Ebs says again, and he’s close now, close enough that panic flutters up Taylor’s chest and into his throat. Ebs closes a hand around Taylor’s wrist, and—

“Get the fuck off me,” Taylor says, and shoves Ebs back. There’s a moment where they stare at each other, and then Taylor shoulders his way past him and over to the mat where they keep their shoes. He undoes his laces, breathing hard.

“Sorry,” Ebs says behind him, subdued. “I didn’t mean…”

“I’m going to bed,” Taylor says, and goes.

***

It takes a few minutes in his own room for his heart to go back to a normal speed. Then he just feels sick.

Everything is fucked up now. He and Ebs never fight, not like that, and now Ebs thinks…Taylor doesn’t even know what Ebs thinks. But it’s all twisted up and wrong now.

It’s not, like—it’s not really Taylor’s fault. Ebs was the one being weird. But the longer Taylor lies on his bed, the less he cares about that, and the more he just wants it all to go away.

He gets up after a while and goes down the hall toward the bathroom. He has to pass by Ebs’ room on the way, and, well. That’s just where the bathroom is. Taylor’s not planning on anything.

The door to Ebs’ room is open, though. Ebs is lying on his bed in the dark, laptop on his stomach playing some show. He doesn’t say anything when Taylor stops in the doorway, but he does look up.

Taylor fiddles with his pajama cuffs. “I’m sorry,” he says.

There’s a pause, and then Ebs huffs a laugh. “You don’t have to be sorry. I mean, I was kind of a dick.”

“Yeah, but I—I don’t know. I’m just sorry.”

“Me, too,” Ebs says, and it’s such a relief that Taylor wants to smile. He doesn’t, though. He doesn’t want it to be weird.

They’re silent for a moment, and Taylor shifts his weight a little. There’s a burst of theme song from the laptop. “ _How I Met Your Mother_?” Taylor asks.

Ebs grins sheepishly. “I got inspired. You wanna watch?”

“Yeah,” Taylor says, and now he does smile, because this feels normal again.

They could definitely go into the living room to watch, but Ebs is already in bed, and—Taylor slides in next to him. “Dude, your sheets are freezing.”

“Maybe you’re just a wimp.” Ebs shifts the laptop so that it’s between them, keeping them apart. Taylor’s pulse blips for a moment, wondering if that’s intentional—if Ebs _knows_ now—but no. Ebs can’t know. Whatever he thinks about the thing with Laura, he doesn’t know.

They watch the episode with the slutty pumpkin and then the one where Ted and Marshall fight a duel over the apartment. “We would totally do that,” Ebs says.

“Mm,” Taylor says, blinking heavily. All the adrenaline of tonight is catching up with him. “But with, like, hockey sticks.”

“I would win.”

“You would not.” Taylor smacks a hand in his direction and ends up hitting the comforter. “You would just break everything.”

“You’d better not try to move out, then.”

Taylor hides his grin in the pillow.

They reach the end of the episode, and Netflix does the thing where it asks if they’re still watching. Taylor would click yes, but he’s having trouble keeping his eyes open. He’s not actually even sure it was the end of the episode. He might have zoned out for a minute there.

Ebs doesn’t hit the button, either. They just lie there, the building making its soft humming nighttime noises around them. Ebs’ pillow is soft, and it smells like their laundry detergent, and Taylor feels like he has little lead weights all along his body. It’s nice.

He should go to bed. Instead he keeps lying there in the bubble of quiet, listening to Ebs’ soft breathing a couple of feet away, and then he opens his mouth and says, “You were right tonight.”

There’s a moment of silence from Ebs. Taylor isn’t sure he’s awake, and he isn’t sure he wants him to be. But then Ebs says, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Taylor says, and he feels like he’s going over a cliff: stomach clenching, about to fall, no way to stop. “I didn’t sleep with her.”

More silence. Then a rustling, like Ebs is turning over. Turning towards him, maybe. “Why not?”

There’s a true answer, one that Taylor isn’t going to say. He swallows around the metallic taste in his mouth. “I haven’t ever done that,” he says instead, and that’s true a true answer, too—true enough to catch in his throat as it comes out. “I guess I sort of…freaked out.”

“Oh,” Ebs says, soft in the darkness, and Taylor’s stomach unclenches a bit, because that’s so much better than it could have been. He takes in a deep breath of pillow-smell and tries to relax. It’s Ebs. It’s not like he’s going to say anything awful.

“It’s not really…scary,” Ebs says. “But yeah. It is, like. Kind of a big thing, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Taylor says in relief. He closes his eyes, and like this, it might as well be absolute dark, no glow of the laptop screen or anything. Just him and Ebs, suspended in space. “Did you, um, on your first time. Were you scared?”

Ebs laughs, just a soft exhale. “No. I was drunk.”

“Oh.” Taylor was kind of drunk tonight. A little. Not a lot. But Ebs wouldn’t have to be as drunk as Taylor would to want to have sex with a girl. “So…it was good?”

“Yeah.” There’s a smile in Ebs’ voice. “She was this friend of my cousin’s. We were at this party, and she kept looking at me, and…fuck, she smelled amazing.”

Taylor inhales shakily. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Ebs’ voice is dreamy, like he’s remembering. “I kept meeting her eyes across the room, like every time I looked over, and—I mean, you know what it feels like to be into someone.”

Taylor does. It feels kind of like this: little tingles all over his body, warmth that starts in his throat and rolls down to the bottom of his gut. “Was it easy? Making it happen?”

“Kinda.” The bed creaks as Ebs shifts. “We started talking, and then we started dancing, and, I don’t know. She was super into it, so I kissed her, and she just, like, pushed her body against mine. It was fucking amazing.”

It’s so easy to picture it. “And that was—that was it?”

“Well,” Ebs says with a laugh, “she was already grinding up on my dick, so it’s not like we had far to go, you know?”

Taylor bites his lip to keep from making a sound. His own dick is throbbing against his pajama bottoms, and he would touch it, if he were alone. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

They lie there in silence for a few minutes, Taylor trying to control his breathing. He tries to ignore his cock, too, but he can feel the fabric of his pajama pants rough against the head and it’s just enough to keep him hard.

He wants Ebs to say more things. Tell him everything. But he doesn’t know how to ask for that.

“Well,” he says after a while. His mouth is dry. “I guess it’s pretty late.”

“Yeah,” Ebs says, a puff of air, and Taylor rolls out of the bed. He’s lucky the lights are off, because otherwise Ebs would be getting an eyeful of the tent in his pants.

“Goodnight,” he says, and flees for his own room.

He ends up flat on his back in his bed, fist working over his cock. His hand is slick with lotion, the head of his cock slick with precome, and he keeps picturing it. Ebs kissing this girl, Ebs pushing her up against the wall, Ebs’ cock sliding into her as his mouth drops open…

Taylor comes all over his fist.


	2. Chapter 2

They decided to divide the chores when they first moved in, and Ebs ended up in charge of laundry. Which is better than Taylor being in charge of it, definitely, but it still isn’t actually good. Like, Ebs doesn’t shrink things or turn them purple or anything (and that was _one_ time, okay, Ebs, it was a total fluke), but he really sucks at the sorting part. At first it’s just socks or whatever, and no one cares about that, but then it’s other stuff like shorts and t-shirts and finally it starts getting ridiculous.

“Ebby,” Taylor says a couple days before his birthday, slouching into Ebs’ room and collapsing on the bed. “These clothes are all youuuurs.”

Ebs is sitting at the head of the bed, laptop on his knees, probably Skyping with his family. He does that a lot. “So why are you wearing them?”

“They were on my laundry pile,” Taylor says.

“You could have just not put them on,” Ebs says.

“Yeah, but they were right there,” Taylor says, and Ebs snorts. “Also,” he adds, tongue poking out between his teeth, “they look better on me.”

“Oh, yeah right,” Ebs says, and he dives at Taylor—the laptop goes somewhere—and wrestles him off the bed.

Taylor gets the upper hand pretty fast, because obviously, but then it turns into a fight to get Taylor out of Ebs’ shirt, and that means a lot of Ebs’ hands on Taylor’s bare chest and—well, Taylor’s eighteen, okay? He has reactions. It’s normal.

It does mean that he’s not using his weight as effectively as he could be against Ebs, and Ebs succeeds at getting the t-shirt off of him. “Ha,” Ebs says, throwing it across the room. He lunges and manages to pin Taylor before he can go after it, hands around his upper arms. “Pinned you again.”

Taylor looks up at him to say something and then stops, breath caught in his throat, because—he doesn’t usually think about how Ebs looks. But right now Ebs is really close to him, his face brimming with glee, and Taylor can see his dumb sticking-up hair and his dumb sleepy eyes and the dumb gap between his teeth and he probably isn’t actually stronger than Taylor but his hands are firm around Taylor’s biceps and Taylor can’t breathe at all, right now.

Maybe some of that shows on his face, because Ebs’ goes uncertain. Taylor swallows and manages to draw breath.

“Did you just quote _The Lion King_ at me?” he says faintly, and Ebs’ smile stretches wide again, and fuck, Taylor—Taylor wants to put his mouth on it.

“Nala is totally better than Simba,” Ebs says, which means Taylor has license to tease him forever, and he’ll gets started as soon as Ebs gets off him and he can think again.

He grabs the t-shirt Ebs threw across the room on his way out and puts it on again. It’s already dirty now, anyway.

***

The thing where Taylor gets Ebs’ clothes keeps happening. So does the thing where Taylor looks over at Ebs and forgets how his lungs work.

It’s not, like, a real thing. It’s just…an exposure thing. Ebs isn’t even cute. Not cute enough to explain it, anyway. It’s just that Taylor’s around him all the time and they wrestle a lot and sometimes Ebs will put an arm around him when they’re sitting on the couch or burrow into his shoulder and Taylor gets confused, okay?

Probably it would just go away if Taylor stopped some of that stuff and, like, sat on the other end of the couch. But Ebs’ end is the one with the armchairs and they’re really comfortable and…and NHL hockey is exhausting. They’re losing almost all their games these days and Taylor can’t do anything to stop that, but he’s trying as hard as he can, throwing himself at the puck and at the opposing team, and he comes back from practice and from games wiped out and aching in a bone-deep way that sleep doesn’t help with, really. The only thing that makes him feel better is when he and Ebs slump into each other on the couch and Ebs’ body is warm and touching his and it all goes away for a little bit. Sometimes the contact hurts if he has too many bruises, but he doesn’t care, because for once he stops feeling empty and stretched and helpless. He feels like they can make it through this.

Taylor’s not going to give that up, just because he has a dumb crush.

They lose to the Rangers 8-2 on Taylor’s nineteenth birthday, which is pretty much the shittiest birthday gift ever. They’re not even at home, so Taylor can’t go out and get drunk afterward. But someone sneaks a bottle of bourbon into the hotel and a half-dozen of them get drunk in Gags’ room, half to celebrate Taylor and half to forget the humiliation of the loss.

“At least you got an assist,” Taylor slurs against Ebs’ chest, where they’re both sprawled against Gags’ headboard.

“Doesn’t matter,” Ebs says. His hand is in Taylor’s hair, and it feels really good. “We still sucked.”

“Are you fuckers taking my bed?” Gags asks, staggering over. “Am I going to regret this?”

“Aw, don’t worry, you can join us,” Ebs says, opening an arm to him, and Taylor has to bite down on the instinctive desire to say, _no, he can’t._ To wrap himself tighter around Ebs and keep anyone else from intruding.

“Aw. You guys are adorable.” Gags flops down sort of where Ebs was indicating, but also sort of not, and he ends up having to scrabble to stay on the bed.

Ebs laughs. Taylor can feel it through his chest. Ebs also puts his arm back, resting his hand on Taylor’s shoulder. It makes Taylor feel warm and happy, even though he’s pretty sure it shouldn’t. But it’s his birthday, and they just got destroyed by the Rangers, and he has bruises all up and down his ribs. If this is the one good thing he gets today, he might as well enjoy it.

***

Henny’s the one who sends him the link.

It’s a game day, the Sharks coming into town that night, and Taylor’s alone in the apartment when his phone beeps. Henny sends him shit all the time—usually funny shit, so when Taylor clicks on the Deadspin link, at first he looks around to find the joke. Then he rereads the start of the article and realizes it’s not a joke at all.

He reads the first paragraph again. And a third time.

_wtf,_ he texts to Henny, fingers fumbling over the keys.

_I KNO RT,_ Henny sends back.

Taylor has to sit down. His heart is racing. That’s a picture of Patrick Kane. He’s framed in the window of an apartment, a little blurry but definitely him. And his belly stretches out in front of him, huge and swollen and—and _pregnant._

Taylor doesn’t think his heart should be going this fast.

_this is photoshoped rt,_ he texts Henny.

_i dont know,_ Henny says. _ppl are saying its real._

What the actual fuck. Taylor can’t get his eyes off the picture. He feels like he’s going to throw up. Fuck, hockey players aren’t—they can’t be—

There’s a sound in the hall: Ebs’ key turning in the lock. Taylor gets up fast and goes into his room.

Patrick Kane won the fucking Calder. His team just won the Stanley Cup. They wouldn’t have let that happen if—

Taylor sits on the edge of his bed. If Patrick Kane were a wolf. If Patrick Kane were _gay._

There’s only one way for a guy to get pregnant. If Kane is pregnant, then that means—another guy—

Taylor’s heart is pounding in his ears, and his mouth tastes sharp like metal. If this is true, if this is real, then everyone knows. They’ll be talking about it. People will be staring at Kane, and saying things, and asking questions, and edging away from him. It’ll never go away. He’ll never be able to be normal again.

Taylor feels like there’s something locked tight around his ribcage.

He can hear Ebs moving around in the common area, talking to someone. His family, probably. Ebs probably won’t come bother him—they’re pretty good about closed doors. But Taylor suddenly doesn’t want to be sitting in here with his door closed like this. He doesn’t want to be alone.

“Yeah, no, I—” Ebs is saying when Taylor walks into the kitchen. He looks up and meets Taylor’s eyes. “Mom, I have to go. Taylor’s here.”

Taylor comes in and sits on one of the stools at the island. “You could’ve kept talking to her.”

“No, we were pretty much done,” Ebs says. He’s putting together a sandwich at the counter, leftover chicken and tomato and avocado, his back to Taylor.

Taylor watches him slice for a minute. He tries to think of some way to bring it up—some way that doesn’t make it sound like he’s freaking out about it. Finally he just says, “So, did you hear the thing about Kane?”

It’s maybe not as chill as he wanted it to be, because Ebs sounds kind of weird when he answers. “Yeah.”

“Pretty crazy, huh?” Taylor fiddles with the loose fabric edges under the stool.

“Yeah.”

It’s short. Not very Ebs-like. Taylor feels his breathing pick up. “Like,” he says, “we would have been playing him. If he hadn’t been out this fall. We would actually have faced off against him.”

“Uh-huh.”

Ebs still has his back to him. Taylor wishes he would turn around, just for a moment, make some familiar expression. Maybe that would make it easier for Taylor to breathe.

“What do you think they’ll do to him?” Taylor asks. “Do you think they’ll—”

“Can we not talk about this?” Ebs cuts in, voice hard, sharp.

Taylor flinches back. Ebs is standing rigid, his back to Taylor, hands clenched around the edge of the counter.

“Yeah,” Taylor says, his voice so soft he almost can’t hear it. He slides off the stool. “Okay.”

***

Taylor goes back to his room and curls up against his pillows with his comforter tucked in all around him. It’s probably not a big deal. Even if Ebs thinks the worst things he could think, he doesn’t know anything about Taylor. And maybe—maybe he just has a thing about wolves. Being a wolf is way worse than being gay, after all. Wolves can be, like, dangerous. Gay people are just—

It’s really cold in here. Taylor wraps the comforter more tightly around himself and wonders if something’s wrong with the heat, or just with him. He’s not going out of his room to check.

It doesn’t matter. It’s not about Taylor. Ebs isn’t, like—they can still be fine.

They have a game tonight, and Taylor’s supposed to be napping. He does stretch out eventually and get a little bit of sleep, but it’s shitty sleep, and he feels groggy and drugged when he comes out of his room to go to the game.

Ebs is getting his stuff together, too. “Hey,” he says. He looks like he didn’t sleep well, either: his eyes are droopier than usual, the way they get when the team has a late-night flight. “Sorry about earlier.”

“It’s okay,” Taylor says. He feels breakable, like if Ebs comes too close he’ll bruise.

“I just…”

“I said it’s okay,” Taylor says. He doesn’t want Ebs to say anything more, like—he just doesn’t want Ebs to say anything more.

There’s a pause. Then, “Okay,” Ebs says.

They’re both quiet on the way to the rink. Taylor spends the car ride wondering what it’ll be like when they get there, like, if anyone will be talking about—

Of course they are. They’re not talking about anything else. “Like, what the fuck,” Whits is saying loudly when they walk into the locker room. “Khabs, you played with him, right? Did you have any idea?”

Khabi’s out with a tweaked back right now, so Taylor’s not even sure why he’s in the room, except that maybe nobody wants to be left out of the gossip right now. “Nope,” he says.

“Wild,” Whits says, then laughs. “Ha, get it? Wild? Like, ’cause he’s an animal?”

“That must be so weird,” Hems says. “Having someone like that in the locker room and having no idea.”

“They can tell stuff about you, can’t they?” Cogs says. “Wolves? By smelling?”

“Man, I would _not_ want some gay wolf sniffing around me,” Hems says, and everyone laughs.

“Good thing we’re not Blackhawks, right?” Whits says, slapping Ebs on the back, and Taylor—

Taylor busies himself with his pads. He doesn’t want to look at anyone right now.

He wonders what it’s been like for Patrick Kane, being in a locker room. How much more a wolf can sense, and if Kane felt bad, sensing it about his teammates. Whether his teammates will be okay with him in the same room as them while they’re changing.

If—if he’s even allowed to play.

There’s so much more noise in the locker room than usual. It makes it easier for Taylor not to say anything. Ebs seems to be doing the same thing across the room, and Taylor wonders about that, but he doesn’t want to think about it too hard.

A couple stalls down from Taylor, Gags is sitting quietly, too. He’s on a bench with his arms on his knees and his head hanging down, and—didn’t Gags use to play with Kane?

Taylor goes over before he can think better of it and sits down next to him. “Hey, uh. You know him, right?” he says.

Gags’ head snaps around, and the hard look on his face makes Taylor flinch. “Yeah, what about it?”

“I’m not—I wasn’t asking like that,” Taylor says quickly. “I just…I don’t know. You didn’t look like you were doing so good.”

Gags’ face softens. “Yeah, sorry. It kind of sucks,” he says.

“Did you know? About the thing?”

Gags nods.

“Shit.” Taylor tries to imagine knowing something that huge about another player. It’s gotta be weird. “Well, I. I hope he’s doing okay, you know?”

Gags looks at him with actual surprise now—like he didn’t expect anyone to say that. It makes Taylor feel weird. Maybe it was going too far?

But Gags grins at him and bumps their shoulders together. “Thanks, man,” he says. “That means a lot.”

Taylor catches sight of Ebs across the room, looking at them. He doesn’t know if Ebs looks away, because he doesn’t look long enough to find out.

Horc stands up to talk about the game pretty soon after that, so there isn’t a lot more conversation before they’re on the ice. Then they’re playing the Sharks, and they’re losing to the Sharks, and that takes pretty much all the energy Taylor has.

Some of the guys are going out afterward, but Taylor knows what the conversation will be about. He goes home instead. Ebs comes, too, and Taylor tries not to feel weird about it. He’s still not sure what happened in the kitchen earlier, and he doesn’t want to think that Ebs is a bigot, but—

Well. He doesn’t really want to think about it.

He curls up in the corner of the couch when they get back, ice pack pressed to his ribs where Joe Thornton checked him into the boards. “Hey,” he hears, and he looks up to see Ebs standing over him.

Taylor blinks up at him. Ebs is sort of hovering, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to sit down or not. Taylor could probably make him go away pretty easily, but then things would keep being weird.

“Did you want to…” Taylor gestures with his head at the seat next to him, and Ebs says, “Yeah,” really fast, and sits down next to him.

They’re not quite touching. Taylor feels like he’s vibrating, like nothing in him can settle. “I think I’m in your seat,” he says.

Ebs huffs. “Such a non,” he says, and tugs Taylor over so his head is on Ebs’ shoulder.

Maybe Taylor shouldn’t melt into it. But Ebs’ arm is around his back, warm and secure, and—it’s been such a shitty day, and Taylor feels so strung out, and he just wants Ebs to hold him right now, while he’s still willing to.

Maybe that’s wrong, but Taylor doesn’t care.


	3. Chapter 3

Taylor finds himself on the internet the next afternoon, googling Patrick Kane.

He knows he probably shouldn’t. But he’s alone in a hotel room in Ottawa, and his laptop is in front of him, and he’s curious.

There’s a lot of shit out there. A lot of it’s the standard stuff: people going on about how disgusting it is that Patrick Kane is a role model for their kids and the NHL should ban him from playing and he should crawl back into whatever den he came from. But there are so many different takes on it, Taylor can’t even keep track. Comments that say it’s okay that Kane is gay, but he’s ruining it for other gay players by being a wolf, too. Ones that say being gay and being a wolf are part of the same unnatural perversion—which, hello, no, Taylor’s one and not the other, so they’re definitely not the same. And then there are all the people who think Kane is being irresponsible towards the sport by getting pregnant.

_Probably just joined the league to mack on other guys in the locker room,_ one comment says, and Taylor just can’t anymore. Fuck comment sections, seriously.

There’s an article in the search results from the Huffington Post entitled, “Why You Shouldn’t Care that Patrick Kane Is a Wolf.” Taylor clicks on it. He would love a reason not to care.

It ends up being a short history of why anti-wolf prejudice doesn’t make sense. Taylor vaguely remembers learning about some of the history stuff in school—the Regina Riots in the ’60s, and the Wolf Regulation Bill that almost passed the Senate—but lots of it he’s never heard before.

Like how wolves almost never actually attack people. How the rate of human assault by wolves is actually lower than the rate of assault by regular humans—not a lot, it seems like, but Taylor’s not good with numbers, and it’s different, anyway. How 39% of wolves who get fired from a job are fired for no reason other than their wolfhood, and how their rates of homelessness and death from injury are way higher than in the human population.

Basically, the article says at the end, Kane’s teammates don’t have a lot to fear from Kane. Kane has a lot more to fear from his teammates.

“Shit,” Taylor says out loud.

There’s a link at the bottom of the page. _Those who wish to know more about wolf support organizations in the United States should click here._

Taylor thinks about clicking, even though he’s not in the U.S. But the door opens before he can do anything, and Maggie comes in.

“You guys have fun?” Taylor asks.

Maggie shrugs. “Ottawa boring,” he says. “You have good—” And then he makes a motion that Taylor realizes a moment later is meant to be jerking off.

“You suck,” Taylor says, throwing a sock at him, and Maggie cracks up.

“No, but,” Maggie says a minute later. “You hear news about Crosby, yes?”

“News about—no, what?” Taylor’s already typing in the search bar, though, and the news results come up before Maggie can even answer.

_Sidney Crosby comes out as wolf,_ the first video title says, and Taylor feels like he’s been hit by lightning.

He watches the news clip. Crosby leaning forward over the table, saying, “It can definitely be hard for us wolves,” and the interviewer staring in amazement. Watches it again. Crosby’s face, so calm and media-ready, like he’s just talking about the season. “The rest of us wolves in the League…”

“Brave,” Maggie says behind him.

Taylor’s mouth is too dry to talk. “Yeah,” he manages.

He’s looked up to Sidney Crosby since he was twelve. Sidney Crosby is…he’s the best player in the League. He could have the best career in the League.

And he just came out as a wolf on national TV.

“You going to nap?” Maggie asks, and this time when Taylor just nods, it’s because his throat is too tight for him to answer.

***

Taylor doesn’t do anything else about it until they’re back in Edmonton. Then he opens his laptop while Ebs is watching some curling tournament or whatever on TV and types in the search bar, _wolf support Canada._

There’s, like, a whole long list of links. It’s kind of intimidating, actually. Should he click on Wolf Families United? Or The Lupine Relief Fund? What about The Full Moon Education and Advocacy Group?

“Whatcha doing?” Ebs asks.

“Nothing.” Taylor scrolls. Maybe the Foundation for Wayward Wolves. Only that sounds kind of dangerous. How wayward are they?

Ebs kicks a leg towards him. “What are you doing all the way at the end of the couch?”

Taylor tightens his hands on his laptop. “Your curling is boring, man. Gotta stay as far away as possible.”

Ebs makes a face. “We could watch something else.”

Taylor hesitates. He still hasn’t even clicked on anything. But—“Yeah, okay,” he says, and he shuts his laptop and scoots down the couch towards Ebs.

He opens the laptop again later when he’s alone in his room and Ebs is safely across the hall. He scrolls down the list again.

It’s so many. He goes back up to the search bar and replaces “Canada” with “Edmonton.” There’s another list, some of the links the same as before, but the one at the top is just called the Edmonton Sanctuary. That sounds…simple.

It’s a shelter, it turns out. Taylor likes the idea of that; he’s not going to be very good at education and advocacy, but he can maybe make beds or do laundry or—well, maybe not laundry. But whatever the fuck shelters are likely to need.

The page has a big picture at the top of a man crouching down next to a small child with huge adorable eyes. Underneath it, on the menu bar, is a link that says “volunteer.”

Taylor clicks on it.

***

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?” Ebs asks for maybe the fifth time.

“I told you, I have to nap,” Taylor says.

“Yeah, but you love Ikea.”

It’s true. Taylor is maybe a little obsessed with Ikea. He just loves how they make all the furniture into real apartments, okay? And the meatballs. Can’t forget the meatballs.

Ebs has not forgotten the meatballs. “We can go to the food court first,” he says.

Taylor hesitates. They serve the meatballs with gravy and mashed potatoes and this lingonberry sauce, and, like, Taylor doesn’t even think that’s a real berry, but it’s fucking delicious. Except… “Nah, I can’t. Have fun, man.”

Ebs gives him a deeply mistrustful look as he goes out.

Taylor waits until his car has pulled out of the street. Then he yanks his shoes on and grabs his car keys.

The Sanctuary is in a really random part of town. Taylor has to drive for like twenty minutes. But when he gets there, it has this huge fenced-in area behind it, and he figures, yeah, makes sense that they’d need to put it somewhere they could get land. Wolves and all.

He feels really weird walking from his car to the door. Like, he remembers what he read about wolves, and he knows no one’s going to attack him in the parking lot, but he can’t help looking around him as he walks up the little path to the door.

There isn’t anyone around. That’s good for other reasons, too. Taylor doesn’t have a lot to worry about if people see him going into a wolf sanctuary—it’s not like it’s a gay shelter or something—but it’s still probably better if no one notices.

The lobby is empty except for a little kid. “Um, hi,” Taylor says once he’s blinked in surprise. The kid is small, maybe like six? Taylor doesn’t know kids’ ages. “Is there a grownup here?”

The kid cocks his head at Taylor. “You mean Marjorie?”

“Sure,” Taylor says, Marjorie will do fine, except the kid just keeps staring at him and doesn’t say anything else. “Um, okay,” Taylor says, and turns to go down one of the hallways in search of someone.

“Hey!” the kid says behind him, and Taylor stops. “Do you like Jordan Eberle?”

Taylor whirls back around. “W-what?” he says, heart going way too fast before he sees that the kid is pointing at Taylor’s shirt. Taylor cranes his head over his shoulder and sees the capital E over his shoulder blade. Goddammit, he’s wearing Ebs’ shirt again. “Oh, yeah, I do,” he says. “He’s my roommate, actually.”

The kid’s eyes go huge. “No. Way.”

“Yeah.” Taylor goes over and crouches down in front of him. “You a fan?”

“You actually, like, know him?’ the kid asks. “In real life?”

Taylor laughs a little. “Yeah, we play hockey together. My name’s Taylor.”

The kid shakes his hand, eyes still saucer-sized. “Whoa.”

“Do you play hockey?” Taylor asks.

The kid nods. “I’m going to be just like Jordan Eberle when I grow up.”

Taylor grins. “What, you don’t want to be like me?”

The kid makes a face. “No, I can’t be like _you._ ”

Taylor feels like he should maybe be offended by this, but, like, it’s a six-year-old. And not like Ebs doesn’t deserve it. “You want me to get you his autograph?” he says instead.

The kid looks like he might pass out. “You…you could _do_ that?”

“Benjie!” someone calls, and Taylor looks up to see a woman his mom’s age, with blond hair that curls under her chin. “Sorry about that,” she says to Taylor as Benjie goes to her side. “Benjie knows he’s not supposed to hang out in the lobby.”

“We ran out of pudding cups,” Benjie says.

“It’s okay,” Taylor says. He’s looking at Benjie and realizing—this kid is probably a wolf. He just had a whole conversation with a wolf.

“He’s going to get me Jordan Eberle’s autograph,” Benjie says to the woman.

Her eyebrows go up. “That’s great.” She glances at Taylor before looking down at Benjie again. “Why don’t you go back to the playroom? You can tell Ariana there are more pudding cups in the hall closet.”

Benjie runs off, and the woman—Marjorie—shows Taylor into her office.

“Sorry about that,” she says. “Benjie and his brothers and sisters just got here last week, and he doesn’t know all the rules.” She shuffles some papers on her desk. “I probably don’t need to start from the beginning,” she says. “You’re obviously familiar with wolves, so—”

“Um,” Taylor says. “Actually. I’m kind of not?”

“Oh!” She looks startled, but she smooths it away with a smile. “Sorry, my mistake. We get a lot of volunteers here, and it’s easy to get confused.”

“Is, um,” Taylor says. “I mean, I hope that’s not a problem. I just thought, maybe I could be helpful—”

“Of course,” she says. “We welcome volunteers of all levels of experience.”

That’s a good thing, since the only thing Taylor has experience with is pushing a puck around the ice. He doesn’t think that’s going to be very helpful with the emergency food bank or temporary adult shelter she’s outlining for him.

She takes him on a tour of the building. “A lot of this duplicates services that exist in the human sector,” she says. “But it can be difficult for a wolf to get a bed in a shelter once his or her nature is known, and of course ordinary food banks don’t provide any of the community that wolves find just as essential as food. Some of them expect you to take the food home and prepare it there, and if a wolf lives alone…well, that’s no way to eat.”

“Sure,” Taylor says blankly.

They keep passing people in the halls, and he has to remind himself that they’re not normal people—they’re probably wolves. They look like normal people, though. They’re wearing clothes and sitting up in chairs and walking around like normal people would.

It’s not until the last room, the lounge, that he even sees anyone in wolf form. It’s just one person—one wolf—and it’s lying on a couch, a man next to it with his hand buried in its fur. The wolf isn’t even moving, but Taylor feels an automatic burst of adrenaline.

He tries to hide it, but he must look over a little too obviously, because Marjorie follows his gaze. “Oh, yes, most of our residents prefer to transform outside, but there are exceptions.” As if Taylor was worried about the wolf being inside and not, like, what it was going to do.

Not that it’s doing anything. It might actually be asleep. “Uh-huh,” Taylor says, trying to be cool about it while she talks about the kids’ area. “Do you guys get a lot of kids in here?” he asks.

“We take as many as we can,” Marjorie says. “It can be tough to place wolves in the normal foster system.”

Oh. Taylor hadn’t realized these kids didn’t have—

There are some adults in the kids’ room with them, sitting on the floor and playing with them. Taylor would probably be good at that. “Can we go in?”

“Actually, no,” Marjorie says, and she leads him back to her office before explaining that they don’t let volunteers interact with the kids on their first day. “Wolf children get attached so quickly,” she says. “And these children have a particular need for stability. We don’t let volunteers work with them until we’ve run a background check and they’ve committed to repeated visits.”

“Right,” Taylor says. He thinks through his game schedule. “Um, maybe I could come back next Monday?”

She beams at him. “We’d love to have you.”

***

He ends up working in the food pantry for a couple of hours before he goes home. It’s not hard—once he figures out what they mean by sorting into food groups, anyway—and no one talks to him much, except to smile and say hi. He’s not even very nervous about being around them, after a while.

He goes for a run when he gets home. He feels—he doesn’t know what he feels, and running means he doesn’t need to think about it much. Just…there’s this whole group of people who he’s never thought about before, and they’re different, yeah, but they’re walking around the same streets as him and looking the same as normal people and stuff. He feels like everything’s a little bit shifted from the way it was this morning.

He’s getting out of the shower when Ebs comes back from Ikea and tosses him something. Taylor just manages to tuck his towel around his waist before he catches it and reads the label: a bag of frozen meatballs. “Oh my god, dude, I love you.”

“I hope that means you’re going to help me lug a five-by-five Kallax up from my truck,” Ebs says.

“Um, no, because I’m going to be too busy eating these fucking delicious meatballs,” Taylor says.

“Think fast,” Ebs says, and two more things arc through the air at him. Taylor drops the bag and catches them both: gravy and lingonberry sauce.

“ _Dude_.” He’s probably smiling too widely for a gift that cost like fifteen bucks, but he can’t help it. He loves this stuff. “You didn’t have to.”

Ebs shrugs awkwardly and doesn’t meet his eyes. “You would have just whined about it otherwise.”

Taylor strides across the apartment and hugs him, a jar still in each hand and towel around his waist. “Beauty move,” he says, and Ebs finally hugs him back, close and warm and shit, Taylor did not think this through.

He pulls back before any problems develop that would be really obvious through the towel. “Okay, bring on this furniture thingy. I’m super good at this.”

“Yeah, right. I still remember the coffee table.”

It goes better than the coffee table. That’s not actually saying a lot, though. They manage to get two-thirds of the shelves in before they can’t find any more of the little wooden pegs, and then they give up and cook some of the meatballs. They taste even better than they do at the store.

“You know, I kind of like it like this,” Taylor says, gesturing at the half-made bookshelf on the floor.

Ebs laughs and jostles him with his knee. They’re leaning against the back of the couch, random bookcase parts strewn about in front of them, Ebs flush against his shoulder, and Taylor’s fine with all sorts of things changing, as long as this doesn’t.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s Sunday night before Taylor remembers that he has to ask Ebs for an autograph. “Hey,” he says, coming into the kitchen. “Do you think you could, like…sign something?”

Ebs looks up from his bowl of cereal. “Finally realized the value of my autograph?”

“Like I really need a nickel,” Taylor says. “No, it’s for a kid.”

“A specific kid?”

“Yeah, just, like, this kid I met last week.”

Ebs makes a weird face. “And…you’re going to see him again?”

Fuck. Taylor really did not think this one through. “I have…an appointment?”

“Like, a doctor’s appointment?” Ebs asks.

“Uh…yes,” Taylor says, and there’s something funny in Ebs’ face and Taylor realizes that all his doctors are at the rink and Ebs knows them. “I mean…”

“No, it’s fine,” Ebs says quickly. “What did you want me to sign?”

This is suspiciously easy. Taylor hands him the blank puck he grabbed earlier. Ebs’ lips twitch as he takes the pen. “What?” Taylor asks.

“Nothing,” Ebs says as he scrawls across the surface. “Just…” He grins a little. “You couldn’t have found a shrink whose kid was a fan of _you_?”

Taylor feels his face burn. “Oh, shut the fuck up. And the name is Benjie.”

Ebs writes the name across the top.

***

Taylor feels kind of weird about Ebs thinking he’s going to a shrink the next day when he leaves for the Sanctuary. But it beats Ebs knowing what he’s actually doing. And anyway, now he has an excuse for slipping out of the house.

“I should warn you, they’re a lot to deal with,” Marjorie says when she lets him into the kids’ area of the Sanctuary.

“I think I’ll be okay,” Taylor says, because, like, he works with hockey players, except that it turns out he has no idea.

“Taylor!” someone screeches, and Benjie launches himself at him the moment he’s in the door. Apparently that’s a sign for a bunch of other kids to also throw themselves at him, and a minute later he has like six small children hanging off his waist and legs. “You came back you came back!”

“You remember Benjie,” Marjorie says. Then, “Ted! You know that’s not allowed in this room!”

Taylor looks where she’s pointing and sees, holy fuck, a little wolf cub chewing on a set of wooden blocks. The cub, like, twists or something, and then it’s a regular human kid sitting naked on the floor. He doesn’t seem to care that he’s naked, because he toddles over to a toy kitchen and starts banging on it.

“They’re not allowed to transform in the playroom, but some of the younger ones won’t be able to help it,” Marjorie says to Taylor. “Spare diapers are on the bookcase. Feel free to come out if you need a break. We can always use some extra help in the nursery.”

“Great,” Taylor says.

Two hours later, he staggers out of there feeling like he just got double-shifted for a whole game.

“How’s it going in there?” Marjorie asks.

“Um,” Taylor says, making sure he still has hair. There was…a lot of tugging.

“Yes, they have a lot of energy,” she says.

The playroom door opens, and a crowd of wolf-children pours out, in the care of two of the other adults who are trying to herd them towards the nap room. Taylor flattens himself against the wall.

One little girl catches his leg and latches on. “You’re napping with us, right?”

“Uh…” Taylor says.

He ends up carrying five kids to the nap room, two of them wrapped around his legs, and settling them all in a giant pile on one of the beds. Two of the kids shift into wolf form and wriggle out of their clothing.

Benjie is one of the kids already on the bed, curled around the kids that Taylor’s pretty sure are his brothers and sisters. Taylor remembers this from his orientation: the way wolves need to touch a lot, way more than normal people. It seems like a nice way to sleep. “Oh hey, I brought you something,” Taylor says to Benjie.

His face lights up when Taylor hands him the puck. “It’s really from him?”

“Yeah, he signed it last night,” Taylor says.

“Sarah said you’d totally forget,” Benjie says. He’s tracing his fingers over the ink like it’s the most amazing thing he’s ever seen.

“She did?” Taylor doesn’t remember which one Sarah is.

“Yeah, she said human grownups don’t care about wolves. That’s why no one wants to adopt us,” Benjie says, still distracted by the puck, which is good, because Taylor’s pretty sure his face is doing something dumb.

“They go down all right?” Marjorie says when Taylor comes out.

Taylor nods. “Are they, like…what’s going to happen to them?”

Marjorie hesitates. “We’ll find somewhere for them,” she says. “Sometimes it takes a while, but we always find something.”

***

The apartment is quiet when Taylor comes home. Sometimes he’s okay with being home alone—it doesn’t happen very often, and it’s kind of a nice change—but right now he doesn’t want it.

He goes to Ebs’ room and finds him sprawled across his bed, messing around on his tablet. “Hey,” Taylor says, collapsing next to him.

“Hey,” Ebs says. “Did you deliver your package?”

“Yeah.” Taylor scoots closer so that he can feel Ebs’ side against his. It’s kind of shameless, but whatever. “The kid has terrible taste.”

“Ha.” Ebs doesn’t shove him away—Taylor didn’t really think he would, but it’s still a relief. He just feels weird after today. He keeps hearing Benjie’s words in his head.

Ebs turns his face into Taylor’s shoulder, actually, which is really nice. Then he says, “Huh. You smell—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, and after a minute Taylor says, “Yeah? How do I smell?”

“Gross,” Ebs says, and Taylor squawks and turns to shove at him. He doesn’t really want to push Ebs away, though, so he doesn’t shove him very hard, and they just tussle for a minute or two before Ebs collapses to the bed and pulls Taylor with him.

“Shut up and go to sleep,” Ebs says, and the words send a shiver from Taylor’s scalp to his toes. He closes his eyes and thinks, yeah, those kids were onto something, falling asleep in a pile like this. Though he bets it didn’t feel as good as Ebs’ arm around him does now.

He thinks about telling Ebs what he was doing today. It feels weird to have this big new thing in his life that Ebs doesn’t know about, and he sort of feels like people need to know—like everyone should know that there are wolf kids out there who just want to cuddle and play and be loved and there’s no one willing to take them in and let them be normal. But he’s not sure what Ebs would think about the whole thing, and he just—he doesn’t want to risk the quiet that surrounds them right now. He closes his eyes and lets himself drift off instead.

***

“Hey, do they play hockey?” Taylor asks on his next visit to the Sanctuary, when the kids are down for their naps and he’s scrubbed the finger paint off his hands (and arms, and hair).

“This is Canada,” Marjorie says. “I’m sure a lot of them play hockey.”

And maybe some of them will go on to the NHL, just like Patrick Kane and Sidney Crosby. “But, like, now,” Taylor says. “Do they get to play?”

“I think some of them might have gear in their family storage areas,” she says. “But we don’t really have the…why do you ask?”

He tells her why he’s asking. “I’m not, like…good at planning things, though.”

She smiles at him. “I’m sure we can put something together.”

***

He leaves the Sanctuary later than he means to, and he’s half an hour late to meet Ebs at the mall. “Sorry, sorry,” he says as he falls into a chair across from Ebs at the food court.

“About time,” Ebs says. “I thought I was going to have to pick out ugly jewelry for your mom myself.”

“Fuck you,” Taylor says. “I had to go to…I had a thing.”

Ebs looks at him curiously, and Taylor looks away, pokes at the order of garlic knots Ebs got for him. “These are definitely not on our nutrition plan,” he says.

“Eh, it’s almost Christmas,” Ebs says with a shrug, and this is just one of the many reasons Taylor likes him so much.

They’re supposed to be shopping for Christmas presents, which Taylor is basically the worst at. He actually has money this year, which is cool, but between hockey and trying to sneak visits to the Sanctuary, he hasn’t had any time. And also he never knows what anyone would want.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t look at jewelry?” he says when they’re in the middle of Macy’s, turning in circles.

“Pretty sure our moms have better taste than we do,” Ebs says. “Maybe, like, clothes?”

“Right, because you have such good taste in that,” Taylor says, and they shove each other a little until a scary makeup-counter lady glares at them and they have to duck behind a rack of fur coats to hide their giggling.

“Oh my god, I think she was wearing _blue lipstick,_ ” Ebs says, gasping for air, and Taylor cracks up again. When he gets control of himself again, Ebs is grinning at him, smug, the tip of his tongue poking at the gap in his teeth, and Taylor—

“Hey, are you okay?” Ebs says a minute or two later, probably because Taylor is staring at him, frozen.

“What? Yeah,” he says, and his voice sounds too loud, or maybe that’s the pounding of his heart. He just—he probably shouldn’t be standing this close. He—

“Whoa, hey,” Ebs says when Taylor ducks around the rack of furs. A random shopper has to jump out of his way, and Taylor mumbles an apology.

Ebs grabs his arm. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

Taylor lets himself be turned around. He’s still breathing too hard, and when he looks Ebs in the face, there are so many words on his tongue, and he can’t say any of them. Not one.

He swallows a few times. “I just. Sorry,” he says.

“No big,” Ebs says, sliding his hand on Taylor’s arm a little, and Taylor would give, like, his entire ELC for the ability to kiss him right now.

“What if…what if we got them chocolates?” he manages to say.

“Good call, everyone likes those,” Ebs says, and it’s normal again.

It’s not, though, because Taylor can’t un-feel the stuff he feels, and he can’t look at Ebs without thinking about it. He thinks Ebs can tell, because he keeps looking at him weirdly on the way home.

“Hey,” Ebs says when they get back to their apartment, “can I talk to you about something?”

Taylor freezes in the doorway. He thinks his heart might have stopped beating. “Um. I kind of want to get these wrapped. Can we talk after?”

“Oh.” Ebs’ voice sounds a little weird. Taylor can’t tell what his face is doing, though, because he can’t bring himself to look up. “Uh, yeah, sure.”

Taylor flees to his room. This is, fuck, this is the thing he told himself he couldn’t do, back when he moved in with Ebs: couldn’t let it get weird, and now he’s gone and—

He does a really bad job of wrapping the presents. He can’t get the corners to lie flat on one of them, no matter how hard he tries to do the folding triangle thing his mom showed him last year, and finally he just has to put the package down and rest his forehead on the bed and breathe for a minute.

It might not be anything like he’s thinking. Ebs could want to talk about, like…the utilities, or something. Hockey. The game tomorrow. Ebs probably wouldn’t have made a big deal about asking if it was something like that, but, like—it could be anything.

The presents only take him twenty minutes, even after he has to rewrap his mom’s. Taylor should leave his room after that, but he ends up sitting on his bed and messing around on his phone instead. It’s no big deal. He’ll come out when it’s time for dinner.

It’s after eight when the doorbell rings. Taylor hears Ebs answering it and paying the takeout guy. Now is really, really when he should come out of his room, but he stands with his hand on the doorknob, stomach knotted and the opposite of hungry.

A knock on the door makes him jump. “Hallsy?” Ebs says. “You want sushi?”

He has to back up from the door a few steps so it doesn’t sound like he was just standing there when he answers. “Yeah, sure.”

They sit on the couch and eat sushi. Taylor waits for Ebs to bring it up, the talking thing, the whole time they’re eating. Ebs is quieter than usual, but then, so is Taylor; every time he thinks about saying something, it’s like his stomach jumps into his throat and he can’t come up with any words.

Ebs doesn’t say anything. They end up watching stupid reruns of _Survivor_ after they eat, and every time a commercial break starts, Taylor goes tense. It doesn’t help that Ebs isn’t even being cuddly like he usually is; normally he would have flopped over against Taylor by this point, but there are, like, whole inches between them on the couch.

Taylor probably shouldn’t have eaten so much sushi. His stomach hurts.

Finally, the second episode ends and Ebs stretches. “Well, guess I’m gonna head to bed.”

He starts clearing about the sushi containers. Taylor gets up and helps, though he almost overturns the soy sauce because he’s so busy watching Ebs.

“What about—” Taylor says when he can’t take it anymore. Ebs pauses, hands full of sushi boxes. “Um. Was there something you wanted to talk about?”

Ebs turns toward the kitchen. Taylor can feel his pulse in his stomach. “Nah,” Ebs says. “It was nothing.”

He’s not meeting Taylor’s eyes. Taylor’s relieved—now they don’t have to talk about it—except… “Okay,” he says, but Ebs is already in the other room. Taylor finishes picking up the sushi stuff and follows, biting his lip.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s pretty okay the next morning. Ebs lays a sleepy head against his shoulder while they wait for the coffee to be done, so that’s normal, and then they’re playing their last game before Christmas, and after that they’re headed home for the shortest Christmas break ever.

It’s so hectic that Taylor barely has time to think, between all the travel and the extended family and playing shinny with his cousins and eating, like, every kind of food ever. After Christmas dinner, someone puts on _It’s a Wonderful Life_ , and everyone collapses on whatever surface they can find, holding their bellies.

Taylor's cousin Lily is cuddling with her boyfriend on the couch. Taylor looks over at them and thinks, _I‘ll never be able to do that with someone,_ and then it’s hard to pay as much attention to the movie.

It’s a relief when his phone buzzes in his pocket. There are texts on the screen when he pulls it out: a bunch of Merry Christmases from the team and from guys from Juniors. His pulse jumps when he sees Ebs’ name.

It’s not even anything exciting. It’s just another Merry Christmas, and then a selfie of Ebs lying on the carpet in front of a Christmas tree, wrapping paper strewn around him, wearing hockey-stick pajamas and a sleepy-eyed grin.

Taylor stares at the picture for way too long. Then he gets up and steps over the kids on the floor and goes to his room.

It’s weirdly dark and quiet in there after the crowd in the living room. Taylor touches the call button on his phone before he can think about it.

“’Lo?” Ebs says. Taylor can hear voices in the background, Ebs’ family or whatever.

“Dude, those are the worst fucking pajamas.”

“Hey, my mom got me these pajamas,” Ebs says, but Taylor can hear the grin in his voice.

“You look like you’re four.”

“I’d still be older than you.”

“What the fuck ever,” Taylor says, but he’s grinning, too. He feels kind of awesome—better than he’s felt all day, and it’s been a pretty great day. “You get anything else, or was that all you asked for?”

“Fuck you, I got the best stuff,” Ebs says, and they compare their hauls, which aren’t actually that big, since they both make more money than their parents now and will probably make even more than that in a few years. But it’s always fun to get stuff. “I’ll show you tomorrow,” Ebs says, about, whatever, an ice cream maker or something, and Taylor just—

“You still there?” Ebs asks, because Taylor’s fallen silent.

“Yeah, sorry.” Tomorrow’s soon. It’s really soon, but it feels really fucking far at the same time, and just, what if Ebs were here now? What if Taylor got to sit with him on the couch like Lily’s sitting with her boyfriend, and everyone was okay with it?

That probably can’t happen, for a bunch of reasons, and thinking about it makes it hard to say stuff. “I had too much pie,” is what he ends up going with.

“Yeah, me too. The nutritionist is going to kill me,” Ebs says. “But, like, French silk, dude. Can’t say no to that.”

“We should make some. To go with the ice cream.”

“We’ll probably burn the apartment down,” Ebs says, snickering, and Taylor really, really wants him here.

“Do you ever feel…” he says, and then wishes he hadn’t, but the words are already out there.

“Feel what?” Ebs asks.

Taylor shrugs. “Like. It’s weird to be here when it’s not our lives anymore, you know?”

“Yeah, totally,” Ebs says. “Like we’re supposed to be little kids again, but we have this whole other life now.”

Taylor nods really hard, even though Ebs can’t see him. “But we’re supposed to go back to this kid role as soon as we’re here. It’s messed up.”

“It’ll be good to get back home,” Ebs says, and Taylor knows he doesn’t mean anything by it, really, but it still makes his chest feel all tingly to hear Ebs talk about their place as home.

Ebs has to go make maple snow with his sisters, so Taylor wanders back downstairs. He knows it’s dumb to feel bad when there isn’t, like, actually anything wrong with his life. He remembers the wolf kids at the Sanctuary and how excited they were about the tree going up last week even though they were going to get like one present apiece, and a lot of them don’t even have parents anymore. Taylor has all that stuff, but this one stupid thing he can’t have is getting him all bummed.

His mom is folding napkins. “Have a good nap?”

“Yeah,” Taylor says. And then, even though he doesn’t have to say it at all, “I was just talking to Ebs.”

“He having a good Christmas?”

“Yeah, he got an ice cream maker.”

“That’s nice.” She keeps on folding, and Taylor does some too, because he doesn’t have anything else to do.

“You know,” his mom says after a few minutes, “if you ever wanted to tell me anything, it would be okay.”

Taylor’s stomach does a slow roll. “Huh?” he says, like, three beats too late for it to be natural.

She looks at him, and he wants to look away but manages not to. “I’m just saying,” she says. “You know we’re fine with whatever you choose.”

Taylor can feel the heat in his cheeks. “Um, thanks,” he says, and gets out of there.

***

It’s not that Taylor’s worried about what his parents would say if they knew he was gay. Well—okay, he’s not exactly eager to tell them. But that’s not the big problem here.

The big problem is the way he feels when Ebs walks through the door the next night and beams at him, and Taylor feels like he can’t breathe anymore.

They agreed to do presents when they got back from break. They collapse on the couch together, and Ebs is grinning really wide when he tears the paper off Taylor’s (real wrapping paper, because Taylor is a fucking adult with skills). Then he cracks up.

“Dude!” He holds up the sweatshirt with a picture of Nala on the front. “She’s the best.”

“Like I could forget your fucking terrible taste,” Taylor says.

Ebs holds it against himself. “Kind of small, though?”

“Well, yeah, I wanted it to fit you,” Taylor says, and Ebs throws the wrapping paper at his head and they wrestle for a couple of minutes.

“Whoops, sorry,” Taylor says when he realizes his present from Ebs is getting a little smushed in the wrestling.

“No, it’s probably okay,” Ebs says. But he does look weirdly nervous as Taylor opens it.

There's a box under the paper, so yeah, it probably isn’t crushed or anything. Inside the box is a watch.

“Oh my God,” Taylor says. He doesn’t know anything about watches, but this one looks really nice. Like, it definitely cost more than a Nala sweatshirt.

“It’s not a big deal,” Ebs says.

“No, it’s super awesome.” Taylor touches the shiny golden metal of the rim.

“I just knew you didn’t have one,” Ebs says, and then, “Here,” as he helps Taylor get it out of the packaging. He buckles it onto Taylor’s wrist, his fingers brushing over the sensitive skin above the veins and making Taylor shiver.

The watch face glints in the light when he tilts it. It’s, like, exactly what Taylor would have picked out for himself. “Seriously, this is great.” He’s pretty sure he’s grinning like an idiot. “I think I need to get you a different present now.”

“Hey, you already gave it to me. No take-backs.” Ebs clutches the sweatshirt to his chest.

“Okay, but, like.” Taylor’s not sure what he’s doing with his face. “I should at least get you something else.”

Ebs quirks a smile. “Nah, you’re good. I just…we’re good.”

“Yeah?” Taylor knocks his knee against Ebs’.

Ebs puts his hand on Taylor’s knee and shakes it a little. “Yeah.”

Taylor ducks his head. It’s, like…it’s a really nice gift. And Ebs is looking at him with that expression on his face, and for a second Taylor thinks that maybe he could—

He goes cold all over as soon as he thinks about it, in a sick way where his stomach is twisted into a tiny knot. He remembers Ebs’ back to him when he brought up Patrick Kane, the hard sound of his voice, imagines that same voice turned towards him. Or maybe Ebs would be nice about it, but he’d still look at Taylor all surprised while he pulled away. _I didn’t realize you—_

“Is everything okay?” Ebs asks, and Taylor realizes he’s just staring at the packaging in his hand.

“Yeah. Yeah,” he says. He lets Ebs tug him against his side a minute later when he turns on the TV, and he presses his lips together and doesn’t think about it, because it’s fine. Ebs never needs to find out.

***

Marjorie calls him a week or so later, on New Year’s Eve. The team's schedule has been crazy since Christmas, and Taylor hasn’t been able to get back to the Sanctuary, which he feels bad about. “You said you thought you could get equipment?” she asks.

“Uh, yeah,” Taylor says. “Let me call some guys.”

He hasn’t actually done anything like this before. But he calls Mike at the rink, one of the guys they’re supposed to call if they have a problem.

“Sure, Bauer does that kind of thing sometimes,” Mike says. “What’s it for?”

“Uh.” Taylor doesn’t really want to say wolves. Not that he has anything to hide, but…the team might not like it. “It’s for…foster kids?” It’s not even a lie, really.

“Sounds good,” Mike says. “Think we can send a camera crew?”

Uh-oh. “I’ll have to ask,” he says.

He does feel like he has to ask, then, and Marjorie turns out to be really enthusiastic about it. “It would be great publicity for the Sanctuary,” she says.

“Yeah, definitely,” Taylor says as his stomach hovers around his knees.

There aren’t any rules against it. It’s not like the NHL can get mad at him for supporting wolves, when that whole thing just happened with Kane and Crosby. But what if the camera guys said something, something like the guys in the locker room have been saying? What if the kids overheard them?

There’s still a week and a half till the thing, so Taylor decides not to worry about it. Maybe Mike will forget. Maybe the camera guys will be too busy.

Someone named Josh calls him on Saturday, though, a week before the thing, to make sure he’s okay with the setup. “I don’t think we’ll need to be there before you guys start,” Jeff says. “You okay with us interviewing the kids?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Taylor says. He should check with Marjorie on that, too, but it’s probably more great publicity. “Do you need the info about the rink?”

“Nah, got it from Mike,” Josh says, and, okay, apparently this is all just going to happen.

They have an afternoon practice that day, so Taylor swings by the Sanctuary to visit the kids beforehand. It’s maybe a dumb thing to do when he has to practice later, because the kids are still super high energy from Christmas.

“Taylor!” Benjie bounds over while this three-year-old named Emma is showing Taylor her new crayon set. “Is it true you’re going to teach us to play hockey?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna try,” Taylor says. He and Marjorie have talked about making it a regular thing, if they can keep getting the rink time.

“Awesome,” Benjie says, with all the fervor of a little kid promised the best thing ever. “You’re good at it, right?”

“Um, yeah,” Taylor says, trying not to laugh. “I’m pretty good.”

“Because I want to be good enough to get into the NHL,” Benjie says, all matter-of-fact. “So you’d better not mess it up.”

“They like you a lot,” Marjorie says when he stops in to her office to say goodbye before heading for practice. “This is good for them, having a non-wolf adult who’s willing to treat them normally.”

“Yeah, of course,” Taylor says. He, like…he hasn’t been trying to treat them normally, exactly. But they’re kids. How else would he treat them?

He’s kind of distracted when he goes to the rink, maybe, because he doesn’t notice anything’s up until Whits taps him on the shoulder. “Yo, d’you hear about Jamie Benn?”

Jamie Benn plays for the Stars. Pretty decent forward. “What about him?”

“He and his brother just came out,” Whits says. “As _wolves._ Team had a press conference and everything.” He flashes Taylor his phone screen.

“It’s like they’re everywhere,” Cogs says, eyes wide.

“Not everywhere.” Whits claps Cogs on the back. “Our locker room’s still clean, right, boys?”

Taylor’s stomach twists inside of him. He knows that the smart thing to do is not to say anything—that’s what you do to homophobic shit, if you don’t want to be called a fag. But he thinks about Benjie wanting to grow up and fit into a locker room like this. “Wolves aren’t dirty,” he says, maybe a little bit more strongly than he intends.

Whits looks surprised. “No, I know,” he says. “I just mean, like…it would be weird to have them here, right?”

“They’d fit right in,” Taylor says. “We already have you acting like an animal.”

Someone whistles. Taylor’s face feels hot, and he looks down, but not before he sees Gags smiling at him from across the locker room.

He doesn’t know why he said that. Well, no, he does, but it was super dumb. He turns away and starts undoing his bag with shaking hands.

When he looks up again, Ebs is watching him with narrowed eyes. He doesn’t look away when Taylor catches him looking.

“What?” Taylor says, heart beating hard, afraid of the answer.

Ebs doesn’t give one, though. He just shakes his head. “No, nothing. I’m gonna get on the ice.” 

“See you out there,” Taylor says, but Ebs is already gone.

***

He’s half-expecting Ebs to be weird after that, but he’s not. They play Monopoly that night and yell about it a lot and Ebs calls him a dirty cheater and sits on him, except that obviously fails because Taylor’s bigger than he is, and they end up leaving the game on the floor and playing NHL 11 instead. So, things are normal.

Ebs is actually cuddlier than usual, maybe. It’s great except for how Taylor keeps looking at his mouth and thinking about things he wants to do to it. Sooner or later, Ebs is gonna notice that. He should…he should maybe try to rein that in.

The Sanctuary skating thing is that Saturday. They have a road trip at the beginning of the week, and then Taylor realizes on Friday night that he’s going to need a curriculum. He doesn’t really know how well these kids skate, and it’ll probably be all over the place, but he should at least have some drills prepared.

Ebs comes in while he’s watching YouTube videos about teaching kids to skate. “Trying to improve your moves?”

“Very funny.” Taylor fights the urge to close his browser window. It’s not like he’s doing anything embarrassing. “No, they asked me to do one of these sometime. Teach some kids.”

“What?” Ebs flops down on the bed next to him. “How come they didn’t ask me?”

“Probably ’cause you’re a bad example,” Taylor says.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t explain why they asked you,” Ebs says, and Taylor has to shove him a little bit.

They settle down after that, and Ebs watches while Taylor takes notes on the videos. Taylor feels prickly, like Ebs is seeing stuff he shouldn’t, but, like, it isn’t as if Ebs can tell what he’s doing with this. It’s just skating drills.

He hates the way it feels to have this secret, though. He and Ebs shouldn’t be like this. They should just be able to tell each other whatever.

Ebs’ body is really warm, pressed against Taylor’s hip and thigh, and Taylor thinks about telling him: can imagine saying it out loud. Ebs didn’t say anything, the other day when Taylor said the thing in the locker room. But he stared afterward, and Taylor doesn’t know what was behind the stare. What if Ebs thinks he’s weird for doing this? What if he wants to know what got Taylor interested?

Ebs ends up falling asleep at Taylor’s elbow. Taylor can feel his own eyes closing—they had a game tonight, and the videos are all pretty similar—and he thinks that he should wake Ebs up and have both of them get ready for bed properly. But maybe he’ll just lie here for a minute with Ebs pressed up against him, all warm and peaceful. Maybe just for a minute.

When he opens his eyes again, it’s three a.m. The overhead light is still on, the laptop open in front of him, and Ebs is asleep, close against his side. His eyes are closed, lashes dark against his cheeks, and his mouth is hanging a little open. Taylor can feel his breath on his cheek, and he wonders if it’s possible to die from wanting to kiss someone.

He slips out of bed and goes to the bathroom and jerks off, stuck on the rise and fall of Ebs’ chest against his arm, the dizzying closeness of his lips. He comes in two minutes flat.

He could wake Ebs up and go back to bed properly. But instead he turns off the overhead light and slips back into bed as quietly as he can. He shuts the laptop and puts it on the floor and grabs a spare blanket to pull over both of them. Ebs must still be pretty deeply asleep, because he snuggles back up to Taylor like he’s glad to have him back. Taylor breathes in the scent of his skin and feels guilty, and dirty, and wonderful.


	6. Chapter 6

Ebs is gone when Taylor wakes up in the morning, and his running shoes are gone, too, so that’s probably what he’s doing. Taylor doesn’t understand how anyone can go running in January in Edmonton, but it works out well, since now he can go to the rink without anyone asking questions.

It’s a rink he’s never been to before, a community one on the outskirts of town. Apparently the owner is a wolf, or likes wolves, or something? He gave them a discounted rate, anyway. He’s there talking to Marjorie when Taylor arrives, and he gives Taylor the kind of look Taylor’s used to by now, where people look twice to make sure it’s really him.

“So you do have expert help,” the owner says as Taylor carts in his gear.

“Ha ha,” Taylor says, because how else do you respond to that?

Bauer delivered all the stuff to the rink directly, thank fuck, because it’s way too many boxes for Taylor to carry alone. All the pads and stuff are super small and adorable, the kind Taylor hasn’t worn in like ten years.

It’s a good thing he got there when he did, because fifteen minutes later the vans from the Sanctuary pull up, and Taylor’s mobbed by several dozen children, most of them under the age of twelve.

“You smell like a wolf,” Benjie says when he reaches the front of the line to get skates.

“Benjie!” Marjorie swoops in. “What have we said about not commenting on people’s smells?”

“Well, he does,” Benjie says, and Taylor’s glad he isn’t the one who has to enforce the rules around here. Definitely not his strong suit.

Taylor thought, when Marjorie suggested it, that three hours would be a long time for kids to be skating. But it turns out to take almost an hour just to get all the kids into their gear. It goes a lot faster once the littlest ones get the idea that they can’t shift, but still, that’s a lot of laces.

The Oil Change TV guys show up just when the last few kids are getting their skates tied. Taylor shakes their hands and tries not to look as paranoid as he feels. The kids are doing better about not shifting now that they have their gear on, but even hearing the staff remind them would be enough to give things away.

Probably he should just tell these guys what’s going on right now. But the kids are piling onto the ice, and he’s supposed to be leading them, and he can’t figure out how to do both things at once.

“Okay!” he shouts to the kids, who are milling in a mob near the rink entrance and shoving at each other. They’ll just skate. Nothing wolfish about that. “Who knows how to skate across the rink?”

Turns out about a third of the kids can’t. Taylor separates them out and does some basic skating stuff with the beginners first while the other kids crash around with some of the adults at the other end. It’s pretty fun; he’s done some stuff like this before, but it’s never been just him, in charge of teaching kids who don’t know how to do anything. He’s really glad he watched those YouTube videos.

He works with the other kids after that, once the beginners have gone off the ice, and that’s the really fun part. They actually know enough that they can do some hockey stuff. He gets so absorbed in helping them with drills that he almost forgets to be paranoid about the camera guys.

Taylor sees them interviewing one of the girls when they’re organizing for a scrimmage, though, and he maybe panics a little. It’s probably too late to tell them now—but what if the girl says something? What if the guys figure it out and are dicks about it?

“Yeah, I used to think I couldn’t play for real,” the girl’s saying when Taylor glides up. “But then there was the thing with Sidney Crosby and Patrick Kane and—” oh shit, oh fuck, Taylor’s too late.

“Did that make you feel better about playing hockey as a wolf?” the guy says.

“Yeah, it’s super awesome!” the girl says, and—huh.

Taylor drifts to a stop next to the cameraman. The other guy’s still asking the girl questions, like whether she ever got bullied for being a wolf on her old team. He doesn’t sound like he’s surprised by it at all.

“Yeah, sometimes kids would say dumb stuff,” the girl is saying. “But I just told them they were wrong, you know? Like, being a wolf is really awesome, and if anyone doesn’t believe it, they’re just dumb.”

“They’re so brave at that age,” the camera guy says to Taylor, and Taylor looks around at him, still feeling startled by everything that just happened. “I hope she holds onto it, you know?”

“Yeah,” Taylor manages to say. The girl and the interviewer are still chatting away, like this is totally normal. Like she doesn’t care that he sees what she is.

“Better check on that,” the camera guy says, and Taylor follows his gaze to where the other kids have started fighting over some of the sticks. “I think you might have a couple of alphas in that group. My wife’s nieces are wolves,” he says to Taylor’s questioning look.

“Right.” Taylor skates over and breaks up the squabble. He’s heard about alphas—it’s, like, a dominant wolf thing—but he doesn’t really know how it works. He…he should maybe try to learn some of this stuff.

Right now, all he has to do is break up this fight. “Hey, everyone!” he shouts. “We’re gonna make some teams!”

The scrimmage is kind of crazy, actually. The kids are still all over the place in ability, even the ones who can skate, and there are a few who are like fourteen and could totally dominate the game without trying. The weird thing is that they don’t: they steal the puck sometimes and battle each other for it, but the rest of the time they hang back while the smaller ones move in a clump and fall all over each other. It’s like there’s some signal Taylor can’t see for when they should play, when they should step aside.

It’s the weirdest mix of cooperation and competition. It’s kind of amazing.

The adults from the Sanctuary are keeping score. “Three-three!” Marjorie shouts when they’re getting close to time, and honestly, it’s a miracle only four of those goals are from the older kids, the way the others are clustering around the puck.

“Okay, next goal wins,” Taylor calls, and just then Benjie breaks from the pack and squeals, “ _Jordan Eberle!_ ”

Taylor whips around. There, standing in the doorway of the rink, is Ebs.

“I want to meet him!” someone shouts, and all the kids on the ice start clambering over each other to reach him.

Ebs is staring at Taylor. For a long moment Taylor holds his gaze, and then Ebs tears his eyes away and grins wide at the kids and comes onto the ice so they can all throw themselves at him. It reminds Taylor of the first day he walked into the playroom, except more so. Ebs is wearing boots, not skates, and it’s amazing that he’s staying up under the onslaught.

Taylor’s heart is pumping loud in his ears as he makes his way over. Ebs is talking to the kids, smiling his widest smile, looking really happy to meet them, but also his eyes keep flicking up and landing on Taylor. Taylor doesn’t even know what to do with that.

“Um, hey,” Taylor says, swooping to a stop at the edge of the crowd.

“Hi.” Ebs seems…confused, maybe. Like he’s not sure what’s going on here.

“Did you, um,” Taylor says. “What are you doing here?”

“Matthew told me this was happening.” Ebs waves a hand, and it takes Taylor a minute to remember that’s the rink owner. “What are you—”

“Jordan, Jordan, look at me!” Benjie says, and swings his stick really hard.

“Careful,” Taylor says, because Benjie almost took out one of the other kids. “Benjie, jeez.”

“Sorry,” Benjie says, still looking at Ebs. Ebs is looking at Taylor, though, with this weird intensity in his eyes. Taylor feels his face go hot.

“Hey, everyone,” he shouts. “One more goal. You guys want to play for it?”

They do, of course. Taylor skates back over to Ebs once he’s dropped the puck. He doesn’t quite look at him—just watches the kids as they teeter towards the puck, older kids snagging it when it goes out of range and sending it back to one of the little ones. Ebs isn’t really saying anything. Taylor feels the silence like a painful stretch all over his skin.

Ebs breaks it after a few minutes. “You know, um,” he says, after one near miss on goal that almost lands in the netting. “You know they’re wolves?”

Taylor feels his stomach fill with acid. “Yeah,” he says, eyes on the kids.

“Okay.” Ebs is looking at him. Taylor can tell, even though he’s not looking back, and then he does look back, and Ebs eyes are meeting his and Taylor can’t. He can’t breathe.

“It’s just,” Ebs says slowly, not looking away. “I thought…”

A whistle pierces the air. “Goal!” someone shouts, one of the other adults who’s reffing, and Taylor turns around to see Team Blue cheering.

Kenzie, the ten-year-old who was talking to the interviewer before, is the one who scored it. She goes into a celly, and her teammates hug her while Team White looks bummed out.

Taylor skates onto the ice, glad to be distracted. “All of you did such a good job,” he says to them, and he makes them line up for handshakes. “This is how we do it in the NHL,” he says to one kid who’d rather sit on the ice and pout.

It’s kind of hectic after that—all the kids need to get out of their gear and back into their normal shoes. They get to keep the gear, but obviously it would be a mess for them to try to carry back their own stuff, so they’re putting it back in the boxes to take to the Sanctuary. “See, your name’s on it right here,” Taylor says to one kid who doesn’t want to give up her helmet. “You’ll get it back.”

“When you skate with us again?” she asks.

“Exactly,” Taylor says. He can practically feel Ebs watching him, and it makes him want to do dumb stuff like hide his face, but he’s not going to be weird in front of the kids.

Marjorie shakes his hand when the kids are being loaded into the vans. “That was really wonderful for them,” she says.

“Thanks,” he says. “I was thinking maybe we could do it more? Sometimes with all of them, but maybe sometimes just the older kids, or something.”

He doesn’t really mean the older kids—he means them, but also Kenzie, who’s hanging back, standing in her boots on the edge of the ice, and a few of the others who are really into it, like Benjie. The ones who might want to learn for real.

Marjorie’s looking at Kenzie, too. “I’ll see if some of them are interested in more regular lessons,” she says.

Taylor’s pretty ready to leave after that—he wants to stop feeling Ebs’ eyes on him from across the rink, anyway—but the camera guys have some questions for him before he can go. Just standard stuff, how he felt working with the kids, and then: “Wolf equality in the NHL. Is that something that’s important to you?”

Taylor’s answered a million questions for reporters over the years. He knows how to bluff his way through anything. “Yeah, I mean, definitely,” he says. “It’s not something I know a lot about, personally. But the idea that anyone has to lie about who they are, just because, I don’t know, they feel like their teammates would reject them, or—” His eyes glance on Ebs, sitting in the stands, and skitter away. “Um, I just think that’s really bad. If people feel like they can’t be themselves or whatever.”

“So you would support other wolves in the League coming out,” the guy says.

Taylor’s mouth is really dry. “Um, yeah, definitely,” he says. “If they want to. No one should have to…hide.”

His stuff is still in the stands when the camera guys are done with him. He brought all his pads and stuff just in case, so he goes to get it all together. It shouldn’t really take him as long as it does, but Ebs is hovering near the rink door, and every time Taylor looks over at him his hands get clumsy and he wants to hide in the stands forever. Just sit here, fumbling with disgusting pads, not having to worry about what comes next.

Finally all his gear is put away and there isn’t actually anything else to do, so he shoulders his bag and heads for the door.

Ebs meets his eyes as he comes closer, then darts his eyes away before looking back again. Like he doesn’t know where to look, either.

“Um,” Taylor says. There are other words in his head, words that have started to crowd into his mind in the last few minutes, and the idea of saying them pinches at his stomach. “I guess I’ll see you at home?”

Ebs opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, but instead he just nods and says, “Yeah.”

Taylor feels like he might throw up. He pushes open the doors beside Ebs, and there’s a moment when they need to go in different directions to their cars, and Taylor thinks, _Now; I could do it—_ but they’re in the parking lot of a random ice rink on the outskirts of town and they’re going to the same place anyway and he doesn’t have to do it yet.

“Yeah, see you,” Taylor says again, and he walks off to his car as quickly as he can and gets inside and twists his hands together.

He can do this. He’s going to do this.


	7. Chapter 7

Taylor takes a wrong turn twice on the drive home. He just isn’t seeing the road. His mind keeps running over words, and moments, and—what if Ebs gets all weird? What if he walks out? What if they could have been great, for years and years, and it’s never the same, and—

Taylor doesn’t know where he’s driving anymore. He pulls over to the side of the road and grips the steering wheel and breathes.

It’s Ebs. Ebs isn’t going to freak out on him. It’s _Ebs,_ and—and Taylor can’t do this anymore.

He gets home eventually. His hands are shaking when he turns off the car, and he feels like he’s not even in his own body anymore when he walks up to the door.

Ebs is in the living room, just standing by the couch. He takes a step toward the door when Taylor comes in, like he’s going to say something, and if Taylor lets him say anything first he won’t be able to do this and he has to do it, now.

He drops his bag. “I’m gay,” he says.

His eyes are still open, trained on Ebs, but he’s not sure he’s actually seeing anything. Or maybe that’s just because Ebs isn’t actually doing anything; he’s just—he’s just standing there, looking at Taylor, open-mouthed. Not moving.

Shit. Shit, fuck, damn. This is—

“I’m just gonna,” Taylor says, groping behind him for the doorknob. He really can’t see, now—can’t quite get enough air and he just has to get out of there, out of there, and then he’ll be okay, he just has to—

“No, wait!” Ebs is springing forward. “No, wait, sorry, I was just—it was just really surprising, I didn’t…”

He’s so close that Taylor has to turn his back to him, fumbling with the doorknob. Fucking hell, why won’t this thing open? He’s opened this door a million freaking times this year, and now he can’t figure out what to do at all.

“Taylor.” Ebs puts a hand on his shoulder. Turns him around, hands on both shoulders, and now Taylor really can’t see, because the world is blurry.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what—it was dumb. Can we just, like, forget I said anything? Please? I won’t—”

Then he has to stop, because Ebs leans in and kisses him.

It’s a light kiss, just a press of his lips to Taylor’s. Ebs’ lips, brushing over Taylor’s.

Ebs pulls back, and Taylor stares at him.

“I’m, um.” Ebs’ cheeks are pink. “I wanted to do that for a while. Sorry.”

“No, I…” Taylor’s eyes feel really wide. “What?”

Ebs takes his hands off Taylor’s shoulders. “Can we—” He moves away, towards the couch. “I need to tell you something.”

Taylor’s body feels like maybe he stuck his finger in an electrical socket. “Okay.”

Ebs sits sideways on the couch, and Taylor sits across from him and thinks, _I just kissed a boy._ He just kissed a boy, and he doesn’t know if it will happen again, but Ebs’ lips were on his. Ebs kissed him.

Ebs’ legs are crossed in front of him, his hands on his feet. They’re only a few inches from Taylor’s. Taylor stares at them.

“I was just wondering.” Ebs rubs his own leg. “Why did you decide to do that thing? With the wolves?”

Taylor swallows. It’s still scary. But nothing can be really scary anymore, not now that Ebs knows. “I—remember that thing in the fall? With Patrick Kane?”

“Yeah, obviously,” Ebs says.

“It was just, I don’t know, seeing him, I looked some stuff up, and there’s, like, all this crap that wolves have to put up with. Like, did you know that wolves get fired all the time? Just for being wolves. It’s awful.”

“Yeah. I think I’ve heard that,” Ebs says in kind of a strange voice.

“So, there was all this stuff that was wrong for wolves, and it was just easier.” Taylor twists his hands together, squeezes one of his thumbs. God, this story sounds so dumb now. “To do stuff for wolves. Because, like…it wasn’t my thing. The way other stuff would have been. And then the kids didn’t have anywhere to play hockey, so—yeah. I did that.”

Ebs is silent for kind of a worryingly long time, and finally Taylor looks up at him. His expression is funny. “So…it didn’t have anything to do with me,” Ebs says.

Taylor’s pretty sure his face is turning red. He looks down again. “I mean. I knew I was gay before you. So it wasn’t…no.”

“You non.” Ebs sounds like he’s smiling. He nudges Taylor’s foot with his own socked one. “I mean because of me because, like…because I’m a wolf.”

Taylor snaps his head up. “No, you’re not.”

Ebs’ cheeks are flushed. “What? Yes, I am.”

“No, you’re…Ebs, you’re…” Ebs is giving him a ridiculously skeptical expression, the one he gives Taylor like every other day, and oh God. Taylor can’t feel his fingers. “You’re…a wolf,” he says.

“I just said that,” Ebs says quietly.

“You’re…” Taylor is blinking too much. “I didn’t…”

Ebs heaves a deep breath. “I didn’t want you to know,” he says to his hands.

“Why not?” Taylor asks and then realizes it’s basically the dumbest question in the world. “I mean, I don’t mean that, I mean…”

Ebs snags Taylor’s flailing fingers out of the air and holds onto them. “I thought you might. Um. There was some stuff you said, to your mom, when we just moved in, and I thought…”

“Fuck.” Taylor doesn’t remember what conversation Ebs is talking about, but yeah, his mom has always been kind of freaked out by wolves. And it’s not like he would have argued with her, before. “I’m sorry, Ebby, I’m so sorry.”

“That was so fucking crazy, seeing you with that rink full of wolf kids today,” Ebs says. He sounds relieved now, and he’s leaning forward. They’re both leaning forward, and Ebs’ fingers move restlessly against Taylor’s. Taylor’s eyes snag on Ebs’ mouth.

“When you kissed me,” Taylor says, and Ebs darts his tongue out to lick his lower lip, leaving it shiny and wet. Taylor feels crazily, recklessly terrified. “Did you mean…”

“Yeah. I…” He moves his face a little, bumping his forehead against Taylor’s. He’s close enough that Taylor can feel his breath.

“Yeah?”

Ebs sucks in air and then slides his hand around Taylor’s neck and pulls him in to kiss him.

It’s nothing like the first kiss. Ebs’ mouth opens on his, and maybe it shouldn’t feel so different from all the women Taylor’s kissed, but it washes over him, completely new, from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. Everything in between is melting because fuck, Ebs’ mouth feels good.

He’s straining forward now, trying to get as much of Ebs as possible, and Ebs is reaching right back. Taylor ends up half in his lap, and that doesn’t work, and then they’re falling against the back of the couch and sliding to lie down, still kissing, Ebs’ tongue in Taylor’s mouth and Taylor’s whole body in flames.

He’s never touched someone and felt like this. Never touched someone and had it get better, not turn into something he had to fight or to fight for, something that’s just there and good and like a gift and—he wants all of it, right now. Ebs’ body slides against him, hard, _hard_ , and the feeling of his cock makes Taylor gasp and grab at him. He feels like he’s going to burst, like he wants to do everything and has no idea how to start.

“I’ve never,” he mumbles against Ebs’ mouth. “I don’t know how to.”

“I know,” Ebs says. His hand is pushing up under Taylor’s shirt, fingers moving over his ribs, and his leg slots between Taylor’s. “I would have smelled it on you.”

“Oh fuck.” Taylor’s hips stutter against Ebs’ thigh. “Did you smell, like—other stuff, did you—”

“Smelled every fucking time you jerked off,” Ebs growls into his neck. “Fuck, Hallsy, you made me so…”

Taylor tips his head back and moans as Ebs grinds against him. He can’t—he can’t even—he was worried about knowing what to do, but he can’t even help what he’s doing, can’t do anything except dig his fingers into Ebs’ ass and push harder, more. He presses his mouth to Ebs’ and it’s such a relief that they don’t have to be separate anymore. Don’t have to pretend to be two separate bodies when obviously they’ve been this all along, this fire pleasure explosion that’s happening, this thing where Ebs gets his teeth into Taylor’s neck and Taylor slams their bodies together and their cocks are—their cocks are—

Taylor comes so hard he loses track of everything, doesn’t even realize how hard he’s shoving his cock against Ebs’ until Ebs is shaking in his arms, his breath gasping into Taylor’s ear. “Fuck,” Taylor says, moans, and he holds onto Ebs as the aftershocks roll through him. “Ebby, that was…”

Ebs slides a hand up to Taylor’s head and grips it so that their foreheads are pressed together, their breath panting into the shared space in between. Yeah. Taylor’s good with this. This is as much distance as they should ever have.

“June,” Ebs mumbles into the space between their mouths.

“Huh?”

“That’s when I first thought about doing this,” Ebs says. His fingers are moving over Taylor’s scalp, just a little, like he just wants to keep feeling it. “When you got picked by Edmonton, this is what I thought about.”

Taylor breathes in the thought. Ebs, thinking about him in June. Ebs under his hands right now. “We didn’t even get naked,” he says.

Ebs huffs a laugh. “We have time,” he says, and he tips his head to press his lips along Taylor’s jaw, the tendons of his neck.

Taylor shivers at the feeling of Ebs’ tongue lapping at the join between his shoulder and neck. It feels good in a way that’s keeping his breathing from going back to normal, and also it sends a warm wash over him that’s more like comfort than anything. He wonders if it’s a wolf thing.

“So are you, like,” he says, and oh, that was a good spot. “Are you an alpha, or an omega, or…”

“Nah.” Ebs’ teeth graze the skin, and Taylor’s eyelids flutter shut. He didn’t know a mouth on his neck could make him feel like this. “I’m just a beta. The boring kind.”

“Yeah, right.” Fuck, it’s embarrassing how fast this is going to get Taylor hard again. “So that’s kind of—it’s nice, maybe. Like, it means we can be on the same level, or something?”

“You wish,” Ebs says with a little dig of his teeth, and Taylor wrestles on top of him and tries to pin him except that it just turns into making out again.

They do eventually get out of their clothes and into the shower, where Taylor gets to actually see Ebs’ cock in the open. He tries not to act like he’s never touched someone else’s before, but Ebs already knows and anyway Taylor is too busy trying to get as much of it as possible into his mouth to care about what it looks like after a while.

“So you’re not, like, weirded out or anything,” Ebs says later that night, when they’re in Ebs’ bed. They’re lying all tangled up with Ebs’ head on Taylor’s shoulder, because he’s the shorter one. It doesn’t feel that different from the way they usually end up touching, except that it’s even better, and when he lets his fingers skate over Ebs’ shoulders a little, he doesn’t have to wonder if he’s going too far.

“I mean,” Taylor says, “I always knew you were _weird_ ,” and Ebs wrestles him until they both come again, biting into each other’s mouths and crying out.

***

He takes Ebs to properly meet the kids at the Sanctuary the next week.

“I was so confused,” Ebs says as they walk in. “Like, I knew you were hanging out with wolves somewhere. But I figured you didn’t know it? Like, your therapist was a wolf or whatever and had a bunch of wolf clients, maybe?”

Taylor elbows him. “You non.”

The kids love Ebs, obviously. He wrestles with them all over the playroom floor and has to promise at least four of them that he’ll come back sometime for their full moon run.

“Taylor can’t do that stuff, but you can,” Benjie says, stars in his eyes, and Ebs meets Taylor’s eye and quirks an eyebrow. Taylor sticks his tongue out at him.

They talk to Marjorie later about doing some kind of joint hockey school. “I can see if Matthew would be willing to donate some rink time,” she says later, when they’re hanging out in the nursery.

“No, we can pay for it,” Taylor says. He keeps getting distracted by the sight of Ebs across the room, holding a baby. “We don’t want to put a wolf rink owner out of business or anything.”

When he looks back at Marjorie, she’s giving him an amused look. She cocks her head towards Ebs. “Go ahead, I know you want to.”

Taylor can’t help the way his face gets hot, even though he knows by now there’s no point in getting embarrassed by that stuff around wolves. They can smell everything anyway.

Ebs is poking his finger at the baby’s face and cooing when Taylor goes over. “Just look how sweet he is,” Ebs says.

“Yeah.” Taylor smooths his hand over the soft baby fuzz on its head.

“I know we can’t, but…” Ebs says.

He’s rocking back and forth a little to keep the baby happy, and Taylor kind of wants this sight to last forever. “Maybe in a few years, though,” Taylor says. “Maybe, like, some of the foster kids? I know it would be a lot, but…”

The smile Ebs gives him over the baby’s head is so good that Taylor has to lean in and kiss him. Just a little.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to apologize for the distinct lack of commentary on Hallsy's mouth in this story. It is certainly not because it doesn't deserve it.


End file.
